The Botanist
by The 5 of Spades
Summary: And if he was too clean for the new world, it was fate that the man he would come to love was the dirtiest he had ever seen. Daryl/OC. Eventual Carl/OC. Semi-canon compliant until Too Far Gone.
1. RAINA

**CHAPTER ONE** RAINA

If she happened upon him at an opportune moment, it was completely and utterly incidental. And to her, it had been opportune; for him, it had been awkward.

In his youth, he had not been celebrated. Long hours would go by writing preposterous lines in the way of, "I will not cry in front of company," or the even sillier, "I will not help Mom in the garden."

Both mantras were futile, as he very much felt the need to cry many times as he was coming up and was of the firm Shrekular belief that it was better to relieve than repress; and furthermore, if not for his time and interest invested in the garden, upon the Turn he might not have survived.

And also, she would not have approached him and they would not have forged the single most peculiar and meaningful of friendships. She was a peculiar girl by his reckoning, and that- if not their experiences together- made it such.

Almost as if animals had begun to sense who the real threats were, squirrels and rabbits no longer seemed to scurry in fear of him as they once might have. Instead, they looked and looked, sniffed, and then ran if he made another move. One such rabbit didn't leave until he'd offered it a rose hip, after which it twitched its nose in thanks and hopped away, hopefully to live a long and fruitful life void of the terrors of the dead things.

She had seen him do it; the thing that his father berated him for. His weakness. His softness. Certainly, he was a foolish man to relinquish food to smarter food and not attempt to fill his own stomach with the creature. One could not afford to pass up the opportunity for a meal in the times they lived in, and if his father had been alive and with him as a younger boy, he would have surely caught a beating and been given more lines.

"I will not feed the fat, juicy bunnies," he would mournfully scrawl.

But for every regretful moment, a positive arises. And in the case of the missed rabbit, a girl tumbled out of the brush surrounding his camp and tentatively shuffled forward, not unlike the animal before her.

He stared, having not seen a child since possibly the beginning of the end.

"M-m-may I," she fumbled over her words like a foal might knock its knobby knees together and fall in its efforts to stand. Her dark eyes flicked toward his single can of beans, all he had left after giving the rabbit his single rose hip. "M-may I?"

He gaped unintelligibly for possibly hours- but in actuality, only an uncomfortable amount of seconds- before fumbling to retrieve an additional plastic spoon from his pack and offering it to her. She shrank away before realizing what he held in his hand, and then relaxed and snatched the utensil with a dart of her own coffee hand in the same second.

They sat far apart, him next to the small fire and her on the fallen log he'd carved into when he first arrived at the small clearing.

When the beans were sufficiently heated, he ripped off a bit of tinfoil from a roll he'd found and poured a little more than half of the contents can onto it- for she looked quite a bit hungrier than he- and gave it to her while keeping the can for himself. The beans were black and seasoned and good, he supposed. He had used the same brand in the old world to make nachos for movie date night.

"What's this?"

He looked up from the can to see her running her thumb across his carving, a confused pucker between her black brows. He felt a small amount of pride; she had not taken her eyes off of him since their acquaintance, and that his art should attract her attention away from himself pleased him. She seemed a fairly stubborn sort, not so easily distracted.

"Tacca chantrieri," he remarked airily. "The Black Bat flower."

"Looks like a lion," she mused. "What's that underneath? Who's 'Diane'?"

His satisfaction slipped away like a dream upon awakening. He had hoped she would not mention the name imbedded a little ways away from the drawing; he had almost managed to forget about it himself.

"My sister."

"Where's she?"

He gazed solemnly down at his nearly finished morsels and waited for the moment of realization; it did come shortly, with a sharp inhalation and a rueful, mumbled apology.

"That's quite alright." He relinquished his unintentionally tight grip on his spoon and put the can on the ground, clasping his hands together around his loosely bent legs. "What are you called?"

She gave him an odd look. "What do you mean?"

"Your name," he revised.

"That's a weird way of asking. What's yours?"

Her eyes had narrowed cattily, and he supposed that for a girl on her own, she must have developed a protective layer of barbs to ward away the unfriendlies. And even the man who had fed her without so much as a word would have to clear some hurdles.

"Sawyer." He adjusted his glasses. "But my friends call me Rory."

"What friends?" she demanded sharply. "Where are they?"

He blinked owlishly. "Dead."

Her shoulder slumped. She apologized again and told him her name.

"Raina," he tried.

She smiled ever so slightly. "We're alliterative."

"Alliterative?"

"Our names start with the same letter," she needlessly explained. "I think it's fate, Sawyer Rory."

The two names together, entirely different sects of his being, clashed unfortunately in an awkward tangle of sounds. There must have been a reason they had never been spoken aloud at the same time in such a manner, and he was fairly sure that it had to have been the cringe-worthy feat of nomenclature she had just accomplished.

"Just Rory, please."

His distaste must have been evident, for she wrinkled her nose and laughed. The sound was soft and rhythmic, and he would have savored and bathed himself in it had it not been pierced through by the less melodic grunts and groans and rustling of nearby danger.

She heard it, too, and fell silent immediately, hand flying to a knife attached to her belt. He donned his bag, stomped out the fire, and extended a hand to her.

Perhaps it was fear that propelled her forward to take it, or an odd sense of homecoming on her part. He was not familiar to himself. These days, if not for the glasses, he would hardly recognize his reflection in the quivering babbles of creeks and brooks; he did, however, see a bit of Diane in her. Maybe in him, she saw someone important, as well.

Their fingers slipped together as they ran, wet with dirt dampened by the clammy sweat he no doubt produced the majority of.

…

They eventually navigated their way out of the forest and spilled out onto an unfamiliar road. He might have known it, but without GPS or a map or any ingrained knowledge of the area, the lattermost of which having completely slipped away upon his flight from the state at a young age, there was no way of pinpointing where they were. The best he could come up with when asked was as follows:

"Georgia," he stated plainly.

Raina grimaced at him, but he only shrugged.

They crossed the road after ironically looking both ways and retreated just within the tree line on the other side to offer some cover as they trekked West, lured by the pink and orange setting sun. Nervousness began to nip away at his cool collection, and several times he peered down at his companion, who had long since released his hand.

"We need a safe place," he told her. "It's almost night."

She exhaled softly. "Nowhere is safe."

"Just a place, then."

To this, she offered a nod of agreement.

A shuffle and moan drew his attention sharply to the right. A limping creature with mottled hands and face dodged around a gnarly tree, gnashing its stained teeth and raising its arms in anticipation of grabbing and holding its potential meal.

Raina didn't gasp or run away. She unsheathed her knife, but he had already surged forward and ducked its grasping hands to kick its legs out from underneath. It toppled and he knelt to sink his own blade up into the base of its skull. Stillness followed.

"That was cool," she said when he returned to her side. "You look clean. I thought I'd be protecting you."

"Not cool, necessary. And," he continued less gravely, "I'm clean because I bathe. Can't say the same about you, little girl."

The corners of her mouth tightened and her brows drew together again, creating that single wrinkle between them. He supposed that this was the face of an affronted Raina, and determined that it was not nearly as intimidating as she probably believed it to be. Further, she resembled the rose hip rabbit even more closely than before.

"I've been too busy running to bathe," she snapped waspishly. "And I'm not little."

His eyebrows had a mind of their own, truly. They conveyed disbelief and amusement all at once and all by themselves.

"I'm not," she insisted. "I'm nearly thirteen."

It did take him by surprise. "Thirteen, really?"

He wouldn't have pegged her for more than ten. A very small, waifish ten.

"Yes." Ire drained away from her voice as the dying light dimmed even further. "It's almost night, Rory."

His own words, heavier than before. The road they traveled alongside wasn't leading them to any place nearby, and so he looked to the trees.

Fortunately, she didn't balk at spending the night tied to a trunk, but he hadn't expected her to. Her mannerisms spoke of someone that had done far stranger to survive.

They settled on thick, perpendicular branches of a convenient oak tree. He fastened her first, and sensed that she was at first mildly uncomfortable with being tied up by a relative stranger. When he'd been secured as well, he felt her relax beside his arm. They would be able to sleep in their bindings, but they would not fall in the night; of that, he was almost certain.

He maneuvered the straps of his pack around his legs in such a way that the body of it stayed firmly between his knees. He had no blankets, but offered her his extra jacket for warmth and she accepted it gratefully.

The creaking buzz of Southern evening settled in his ears like the humming of a computer. He didn't quite like it, but some sound was better than none. Not for the first time, he yearned for the honking and rushing of the city below the fogged window of his apartment.

"How old are you?"

He startled out of his wistful daze and took a moment to calculate how old he must have been at that point in his head. "Twenty-six. No… twenty-seven."

"Oh." She didn't question his uncertainty. No one knew definitively their age anymore, he supposed. "You don't sound like you're from around here."

He smiled. "I was born here."

The turning cogs in her head were audible from where he sat. "But you don't live here."

"No one lives here anymore," he said. "We just survive. There's a line, I think."

She quieted for a few minutes, digesting his words.

"Where did you live, then? Before, when people still lived."

"New York."

She inhaled sharply. "I've always wanted to go there."

"Understandable." He let his head fall back against the rough trunk, somewhat cushioned by the pillow of his hair. "It's an amazing place. Dirty and crowded, but magical."

She laughed softly, and just like the first time, he reveled in the buttery sound.

…

If he claimed to not have brushed closely with death before the Turn, it would have been the most deceitful of lies.

An infection borne of slicing his leg open on a rusty pipe whilst running away from a flock of the dead plagued him long enough to scratch a Will into a wide tree he'd stumbled across, lost in the daze of an impeding fever and shaking with the effort to stand. In the Will, he offered his life essence to anyone who might happen upon the tree after he was long gone and settled under its shade with a gun, loaded with the very last bullet in his possession.

He'd cried, then.

Oh, the things his father would say.

He'd done all he could for the wound; nettles for the infection and yarrow for clotting, wrapped up with mullein for bandaging. For the first time, he felt that nature had failed him and hoped desperately for death.

But the next morning when he woke- for he must have dozed off sometime the evening before- he had not perished. His body was still his own; the fog of fever had broken in the night; the wound seemed less inflamed and sticky, and didn't burn or sting quite as much.

He fervently apologized to nature for his doubt of her and lived to see another day.

Some time later, a few months perhaps, Raina found him and they began their travels together. The day after their meeting, they walked a ways West and arrived at a brief strip of stores; a small plaza, he surmised, and on the other side of the road was a gas station.

There was a secondhand clothing store and a dollar store, settled on either side of a ravaged mart. Rusted carts littered the vacant lot, and if there had been any abandoned cars before them, they had all been hijacked by others. The notion of people that weren't himself or Raina still unnerved him, and so he practically ran across the open space with her closely following.

The mart was appropriately intimidating for all that it might have held inside, so they began with the clothing store. He knocked on the glass storefront with the handle of his knife and made out the shambling forms of two dead ones drawn to the noise.

"Open the door," he instructed firmly. "Stay behind it while I get them."

She frowned. "I want to help. I can handle myself."

"You will be helping," he assured. "It's efficient this way."

She didn't look too pleased with that assessment, but complied. He swiftly took care of the bodies and dragged one off to the side, but let the other one prop the door open.

"For a quick exit," he explained to relieve her silent confusion.

Winter was approaching. The bronze leaves were starting to fall off of the trees, and every day he noticed a certain crispness taking further hold of the breeze. He didn't anticipate snow, because as long as he'd been away from Georgia, he knew innately that there would be none of that. In his childhood, there had not been a single white Christmas.

Still, he reasoned that they would need hats and heavier jackets and possibly gloves. He critically surveyed her high top sneakers and made a mental note to keep an eye out for smaller boots, as well.

They found all of those things and even gum and travel sized laundry detergent at the counter. She did not complain when he handed her a rather ugly pair of worn, sturdy brown boots, but did insist on having a pack of her own to carry her beloved sneakers in.

They searched, and did find one.

Attached to the back of another dead girl. Younger than the young girl by his side.

"You don't need it," he whispered hoarsely. "I'll store them in mine."

Raina shook her head and bent down to collect the bag. The girl had already been put out of her misery, evident by the bloody hole in the back of her head. With shaking hands, his companion managed to wrestle the prize off of the stiff, putrid corpse and stumbled backward into him.

It was a good find; a sizable hiker's backpack, with multitudinous pockets and waterproof lining. He found a plastic bag to contain her old shoes and put them, the winter clothes and some of his supplies into the backpack; he figured, even though his heart contracted at the prospect from only a day of knowing her, that if they got separated she shouldn't have to bear the brunt of the loss.

For a long moment, they stood staring at her newly equipped pack. And then, as he swallowed thickly, he saw her shoulders tremble out of his peripheral. He encircled them with his arm and she let her curly head rest in the soft curve of his side, weak with grief.

"Ari," she sniffed. "My sister."

He knew, intimately, her pain.

And just like she had upon discovering the fate of Diane, he said quietly, "I'm s- "

Rumbling.

Feeling wretched, he knelt and implored her with his eyes to calm down and silence her soft cries and whimpers. She covered her mouth with her hands and, at his urging, grabbed her pack and scurried behind the counter. He took out his knife and cautiously approached the storefront.

There were no vehicles in the lot, but they couldn't have been far down the road. He kicked away the walker propping the door and rolled a clothing rack up to provide some semblance of security before retreating back further into the store once more. He looked behind the counter, only to find more dirty linoleum floors and open drawers.

"Raina?"

A reply came not in the form of her voice, but a resounding crash from somewhere in the back that made his stomach drop. He ran.

There was a storage room with a rather unremarkable blue door. The handle gave under his trembling hand, but didn't allow him entry.

"Raina," he called a little louder, glancing over his shoulder at the storefront and feeling panic trickle into his veins when a line of cars pulled into the plaza. "Raina."

Another crash startled him, and he slammed his fist against the door, consumed with harried frustration.

"Raina!" he hissed.

The door opened just as he gave it a particularly rough and forceful tug. He flew back and a sharp pain lanced across the back of his head. Throbbing patches of shadow obscured his vision, and he flailed on the cold linoleum like a turtle on its back, confused and frightened for himself and his absent ward.

Her pained cry cut through the suddenly dank air and he forced himself to ignore the pain. Her name slipped from behind his gritted teeth once more and she released a strangled whimper. Blinking away the spots and not entirely succeeding, he made out her squirming form from behind a rather large dead man.

He leapt forward without thinking and pulled at its shoulders. The dead man fell atop him and he grunted, oxygen leaving his lungs almost immediately. Raina screamed and even as he fought to breathe, he silently willed her to stop. The cars outside would hear them.

He struggled to get his blade free, drowning in the overwhelming danger of their predicament.

And then it all stopped.

The dead man stopped moving and Raina paused to take a breath and all was silent.

And then she screamed again.

"Rory, there's a man!"

A gruff voice rumbled, "Rick, over here!"

Shit, he inwardly swore, still void of air.

...

 **A/N: Should I continue? It's a bit short, but the next would be longer. Review, tell me what ya think.**


	2. THE OLD MAN AND THE SUBTLE WARRIOR

**CHAPTER TWO** THE OLD MAN AND THE SUBTLE WARRIOR

" _Three weeks_? That's almost a month, Sawyer!"

He flinched when the sharp slap of a stack of papers hitting the bedside table met his ears. David was frustrated, he knew, but David was always frustrated. It was just how he assumed lawyers were - uptight and restless, like they were never satisfied with anything. Like his father.

"Diane needs me."

David huffed. " _I_ need you."

And whiny. But that was a characteristic he reserved solely for his boyfriend; his father had looked down upon whininess like one might look at the scraped-off remnants of a daddy long leg spider on the pavement.

He bent to flip the lid of his suitcase closed and stretched his fingers gratefully, satisfied that he'd done a sufficient job packing. It would be a long trip; he didn't want to have to wash clothes every three days or - worse - have to buy more just for a three-week stay. He was nothing if not frugal, and the very prospect made his wallet cringe.

When he turned away from their bed upon which the case was perched, David was still standing next to the bedside table, arms crossed and expression strung along the line between hurt and somewhat unyielding, and he considered the notion that maybe David wasn't simply being whiny - that the other man genuinely didn't want them to be apart.

He deflated.

"She's having a tough time." He struggled to compose the words to describe the pull he felt to his sister whenever he felt she was on the precipice of another episode. "I - I have to go check on her, stay for a while. And you know I'd bring you, but - "

"The Reynolds case," David finished with a displeased frown. "I know how close you and Diane are, but _three weeks_ , Rory? Is it really that serious? Has she said anything that's… I don't know… sketchy? Or are you wasting a month on a gut feeling?"

The delicate swirl of sympathy dancing like lazy dust motes in the pits of his heart flew away on a gust of cool wind. A heavy, leaden ball replaced it, and he imagined that the look he regarded David with was far from open or warm.

"Even if it turns out to be nothing," he said, "three weeks with Diane wouldn't be a _waste_. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to eat something before I leave - airport sandwiches are practically a month's rent and in the city we live in, that's saying something."

He ran a hand through his hair when his half-hearted attempt at lightening the tone of his words did nothing to diffuse the tension between them and shook his head before beating a subdued retreat into the kitchen.

He prayed David would drop the subject, because he absolutely abhorred losing his temper. The bubbling heat of anger made his gut churn unpleasantly, the aftermath left his head throbbing, and the venomous words he dished in the interim were reminiscent of Vincent's.

He retrieved the good Havarti from the refrigerator and the seedy, whole grain bread that they'd stuck to for their short-lived couple's diet from the cabinet. The smooth, faint aroma and sizzling of the butter in the pan made his lips twitch despite himself.

"I told you to stop doing that," David reminded him quietly, appearing in the doorway. "You can be mad, babe. I know what I said was stupid."

He flipped the sandwich with a small frown, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

"Lash out," David suggested flatly. "Yell at me. Slap me, whatever. Do… _something_."

"I'm not slapping you," he snapped.

" _There_ we go."

"That wasn't funny. That's never going to be funny."

David rolled his eyes and vacated the doorway, leaving an air of exasperation and mild irritation behind him.

David couldn't seem to comprehend the fact that rage was just one of those things that raised the hairs on his arms.

His boyfriend knew to an extent that his father hadn't been the nicest of people, but he made damn sure that the two never met under any circumstance. It was perhaps because of this that David did not know just how terrible and awful that burning feeling truly was, and how it accurately described Vincent Lake - the very epitome of vitriol and antipathy.

…

"I never got the chance to thank you properly."

The wizened man, to whom he likened the Monopoly caricature, nodded in welcome, a warm smile passing over his mustached lip.

"With hands that see more destruction than anything else these days, it's a blessing to be reminded that they were made for better," said Hershel. His eyes were keen and sharp. "But you already know that, don't you, son?"

"I like to think that I do, sir."

Hershel nodded again and he took a moment to revel in knowing that he sat next to a man around the age of his own father that treated him with respect, cordiality, and even early onset fondness. It was surreal in every sense of the word, but looking around the makeshift fire pit, he could think of a thousand other things that were just as strange.

It was, for lack of a better term, _unnatural_ for folks to help other folks these days.

Impractical. Unthinkable. Inconceivable.

There was nothing - no requirements, no expectations, no _laws_ \- dictating the necessity of assistance for those who needed it. If anything, it was generally accepted that everything and everyone was fair game, and though it scared him more than he liked to admit, he also recognized and acknowledged it for what it was: a pillaging bloodbath falsely justified and endorsed by the participants with no orderly buffer to speak of.

And so to think that Hershel's group - led by a rather intense, but sensible man by the name of Rick - had put themselves out to help himself and Raina, who would have surely expired otherwise, blew him away.

It also unnerved him.

He'd never gone longer than a week traveling with anyone without an incident.

He didn't want his poor luck to befall these nice people.

He caught the surly, blue-eyed gaze of the hunter from a little aways away from the group settled around the conservative flames. Daryl looked away first and he took the opportunity to truly appraise his tan skin, exposed by streaks of sweat through a thick layer of filth.

"Rory?"

The creeping prickle of embarrassment brushed at his cheeks and ears as he turned to acknowledge the slight blonde that had called him.

Beth smiled, but it was innocuous enough that he deduced that she had not traced his staring.

"You said you were from the Big Apple," she said. It wasn't a question. He nodded, bemused at having someone actually refer to it as such in a non-joking fashion. "Did you go to any concerts there? What was it like?"

He pondered this for a moment, and realized that everyone seemed to be listening, Raina included.

"I went to a few in college. Coldplay and the Arctic Monkeys and a Neil Diamond cover band that my ex dragged me to," he mused. "And that same ex played violin for the New York Philharmonic, so I went to classical ones a lot, too."

"Your ex played in the New York symphony orchestra?" Glenn clarified, impressed. "Was she any good? Wait, forget I asked - of course she was."

"He." At Glenn's quizzical look, he pushed his scratched glasses further up his nose and elaborated quietly, " _He_ was good. Brilliant, even."

For a moment, he wished he hadn't corrected the assumption; his shoulders tensed and he felt sixteen again, shrinking into the wall while Vincent bellowed in revulsion about disgrace and blasphemy.

And though instinctively he avoided looking at Hershel because of this, he couldn't help himself. He braced for the drastic metamorphosis the old man's perception of him must have weathered and prepared his psyche for a visual reminder of just how similarly old lights shined.

But Hershel only continued to gaze upon him with dignity and respect, and the lack of hostility was like a balm to his sore morale.

"My oldest sister has a girlfriend," Glenn admitted with a small smile, and he returned it awkwardly because it was an awkward thing to say. "W-well, had. I don't know."

Maggie rubbed his back. A throb of painful empathy ran through him and he stood abruptly, making Raina jump - and as a result, wince - from her spot next to Carol, who had taken to her almost immediately.

"Sorry," he murmured, and she furrowed her brow when he halfway turned to leave. "I won't be gone long."

She nodded and turned back to the fire.

The garage they'd settled in for the evening - appropriately dubbed _Otto's_ \- had three large ports with ribbed doors that screeched in rusted protest when opened, so he headed for the heavy side door instead. The exhaust fans were useless without electricity, but the metal grates on the back wall - which was covered with shelving and tools that they pilfered gratefully - let the smoke of the stone-circled fire out well enough.

As he passed Daryl, he attempted to divest himself of the acute sensation of being visually stalked like unsuspecting prey. It was preposterous, really; merely his mind's yearning to be like Bambi in his own right.

The short, wispy hair on the back of his neck, however, would not go back down. Even as he picked a suitable tree beside the derelict building and went about his business, the feeling didn't abate.

His soft exhales pooled like pearly cigarette smoke against the dark backdrop of the woods. Breathing too loudly felt like a death sentence.

Despite his painstaking efforts to stay quiet, rustling of bushes a few yards to his right snagged his attention and he sighed, redoing his jeans and working his knife from his back pocket just as a dead woman with three patches of coarse auburn hair came shambling toward him, snarling and gnashing her teeth ravenously.

His knife went through her skull like it might have through a tough pork chop, and the unbidden comparison vaguely sickened him.

It didn't come back out as easily, and as he struggled to free the blade, the whistle of something thin slicing through the air and a heavy thud against the short, scraggly grass behind him turned his head.

Another dead one with a bolt sticking out of the side of its head lie uncomfortably close to his feet. He looked up in time to see Daryl lowering his crossbow around the corner of the building.

"Twice in twenty-four hours," he managed, feeling utterly incompetent. "I'm afraid you'll start to think I'm a complete idiot."

Daryl only stared.

He shifted his weight back and forth for a moment before bending with one boot on the first dead woman's neck and executing one final, successful yank of the handle of his knife. He wiped the blood and gunk on her once-pretty patterned dress and tucked it away again.

Daryl was still standing there watching with a small frown when he turned to go back inside.

"Is there something on my face?"

Almost as if startled that he'd spoken, the bowman's head reared back slightly. "Get back in here 'fore ya nearly get a bite taken outta your ass again," he grunted roughly.

He felt the corners of his mouth twitch downward. "I knew I wasn't imagining things."

"What?" Daryl snapped, nonplussed.

"You think I'm stupid," he explained flatly. "I'm eternally grateful to you for saving my life - twice - but I'm not incapable."

"Never said ya were."

If he was flustered, it was because of the sinking in his gut that wasn't at all related to not believing Daryl. He envisioned a hole, inhabited by himself, getting deeper and deeper by the second at the mercy of his own self righteous shovel. The faint whiffs of a memory teased his consciousness, and he vaguely recalled his mother - of whom he had very little memory - saying, " _No one can_ make _you feel inadequate_."

The only recollections he had of the woman were early ones, and nearly all of them were made memorable to his younger self by brief monologue and peculiar interactions that made complete sense in the wake of her suicide.

If he had been fooled by the delusion that Daryl truly thought him incompetent, it was only because he knew in the back of his mind that the other man would have every reason to; in thinking such, he unwittingly subscribed to the notion himself, and that would simply not do. Mind over matter was a legitimate mental strategy in survival to an extent, and if he believed himself to be too weak to handle the rigors of making it in the new world order, he had already lost the game.

"Well," he cleared his throat, "I'm not. Glad we could straighten that out."

Avoiding the hunter's eyes, he darted back into the building, tail tucked and head low.

In the morning, everyone got up without much complaint despite the obvious discomfort displayed by all after having spent the night on the hard, concrete floor of a garage. Rick's wife had been given most of the padding, followed closely by Carl and Raina, and he had obligingly handed over his own sleeping bag as well without a word the night before, just like the rest. Back pain notwithstanding, they had survived another night and the new day was just another one they were graciously afforded by the powers that be.

Before leaving out from the small gravel lot behind the garage, Rick rallied the troops for a huddle. Rory ushered Raina over to the small green car before going and standing between Carol and Glenn, the latter of whom made a bit of room to include him in the slightly misshapen circle.

"We can't stay out here on the road all winter," Rick sighed tiredly, running a hand over his face. "But if we settle, it's gotta be in a sustainable, safe place. Can't just plonk down at the first house we see."

"Why not?"

The eyes on him made him suddenly very uncomfortable, but he merely shrugged off their obvious stares and stepped back, unwilling to cause shift as the newcomer. Rick seemed to have other ideas.

"You wanna elaborate on that?"

He swallowed, but felt a small hand slip into his and took a deep, steadying breath.

"You say the place has to be sustainable, safe," he began slowly, "but chances are, you're not going to stumble across something so convenient. You might consider composing a checklist of bare minimum environmental factors - whether it's too close to the road or if there's fresh water nearby; if it's too clean to be abandoned, even - and commit to a solid foundation that you can build off of."

Rather than looking annoyed or forcibly patient, Rick acknowledged this with an incline of the head. "What'd you do before all this, Lake?"

He scratched the back of his neck. "Urban planning," he admitted with a small smile. "And a whole lot of gardening."

"Interesting," said Rick, eyeing him speculatively.

…

"Your turn, Raina," Maggie smiled.

He gazed upon the girl, amused, as she had paused midway in braiding a crown around her head and her left shoulder was pressed to her cheek in a way that partially squished the lower half of her face. He briefly wondered if her actions pulled at the wound in her side, but she didn't seem bothered, so he let it lie.

"I miss the radio," Raina sighed mournfully.

"You know what? Me too," Glenn agreed vivaciously. "Road trips were so much better with J. Biebs."

Raina kicked the back of the Korean man's seat and earned a startled laugh for her efforts. "Being a girl does not automatically make me a _Bieber_ fan."

No one seemed to want to mention the fact that their "road trip" didn't exactly fit the archetype of typical treks across state Before. They weren't in it for the laughs or the experience; they were seeking potential nests to reside in and call their own, hopefully away from the rest of the savage world and presently, before winter ensnared them in the cold snap of her jaws. They had taken to wearing at least two jackets each, and by his own approximation, he supposed it was perhaps early to mid-November.

Taking into consideration his former city of residence, however, he had to concede to his higher tolerance to the biting chill.

"Rory?"

He turned away from the window and, as a consequence, the mesmerizing blur of the thinning trees, and saw that Raina and Glenn were staring at him with open, expectant faces. Maggie had her eyes on the road, but he felt her tangible anticipation as well.

"Oh." He threw out the first thing that came to mind: "Havarti."

Raina screwed up her face in confusion, and Glenn emitted a peculiar grunting noise that evidenced his befuddlement as well.

Feeling irrationally city-ish, he revised, "Cheese."

Glenn snorted. "Cheese?"

"From what I've gathered, we won't be having any of it any time soon. Unless you know where we might acquire a cow and a fromager."

"A goat," Raina murmured.

"Or a goat," he allowed.

"No," she shook her head, and pointed out of the window at the field they were passing. "A goat, Rory."

He leaned toward her side and blinked.

"Well, I'll be damned."

Maggie shortly honked the horn once. The car slowed to a stop, as did the rest of the caravan sandwiching them. Raina slid out with a barely concealed wince and he followed, frowning at her. She shrugged and pointed once again at the goat.

Glenn looked absolutely gobsmacked as he slammed his door behind him. "I would also like a lifetime supply of condoms and twinkies," he told the sky.

Rory laughed when Maggie punched her boyfriend in the arm.

"What's goin' on?" Rick asked, striding forward with terse, impatient steps. Carl was hot on his heels.

"Raina saw a goat," Maggie informed him, gesturing out to the vast field.

Rory took a moment to observe the majesty of the white and reddish-brown creature before they encroached its space. It grazed contentedly, unaware of its fate.

"Beautiful," Hershel murmured, stepping up next to him. He smiled in agreement.

"Tasty," said Carl.

"The milk, you mean," Raina snapped.

"No, I meant the goat," the boy retorted unrepentantly.

"I do believe milk should be made priority," Hershel remarked, turning to Rick, who looked about as amazed as Rory felt at their immense fortune. "It'll be good for Lori."

Carl seemed to back down at this, though his eyes remained trained hungrily on the object of their discussion. Daryl strolled over with his crossbow in hand, but Carl only shook his head at him ruefully. The crossbow lowered.

"How do we catch her?" Raina asked no one in particular.

"We don't know if it's a 'her', yet," Carl hurried to point out. "It could be a boy, and then we'll be having lamb chops for dinner, right?"

"Not all that hard to catch a goat," Maggie answered Raina, almost as if Carl hadn't spoken. "They aren't like chickens. Chickens are a nightmare."

Carl scowled. "Hello?"

"We just gotta corner it somehow," Rick mused, also semi-playfully ignoring his son. "Everybody takes a side and we fall in."

Rory frowned. "Seems sneaky. We could just offer it food."

"What food?" Daryl scoffed.

His cheeks burned. "Fair point."

"We'll need rope," Hershel said.

Nearly everyone turned to Daryl, who grunted something that sounded a bit like, "Got it."

The naming of the goat turned into a grandiose affair that had Raina and Carl bickering back and forth like the children they were supposed to be. Carl had come off as far too serious and edgy for a boy of his age, and Raina didn't fair much better in that sense with all of her caginess and the thick layer of aggression that lay just underneath the surface of her very skin.

Seeing them both oscillate between fawning over the goat - that Carl miraculously had a change of heart about after staring into its soulful, elongated pupils - and making half-hearted snips at each other's suggestions was as heartwarming as it was a relief.

"Carl, Jr.?" he heard Raina huff derisively. "It's not your child. If anything, it should be Raina, Jr. since I saw it _and_ it's a girl."

Carl snorted. "Girls can't be juniors."

"And yet Carl, Jr. makes sense?"

"It's the greatest name of all time," Carl retorted with a smug smile. Lori sniffed loudly and the two preteens turned to stare at her questioningly.

"It's just…" she began, eyes tentatively darting up to connect with her son's, whose own had iced over. "Carl, you begged us to change your name all throughout grade school."

"I don't remember that," Carl remarked coldly, and then turned away from her. If Raina found the exchange as odd and stilted as Rory did, she didn't say anything. "If Carl, Jr. is officially out of the running, then I hereby propose Bruce Wayne."

"Again," Raina ground out, "it's a _girl_."

Beth, who had been helping make a somewhat sufficient pen for the goat in the back of the pickup, chimed softly, "Weren't y'all talking about cheese earlier?"

"Yes," Rory admitted.

The tiny blonde quirked her mouth to one side. "Name her Feta."

He smiled.

Carl and Raina looked at each other, and then at the goat; Lori had already wandered quietly back to the station wagon with the air of a woman defeated; just like himself, Hershel, T-Dog, Carol, Glenn, Maggie, and to an extent, Daryl, had gathered to witness the name squabble. Glenn was still muttering under his breath about God not making it rain prophylactics and fattening snacks, T-Dog, Carol and Maggie were mildly entertained, and Daryl was ensuring that the goat's makeshift rope leash was secure without being too tight and not really listening as a result.

"That's a fine name," Hershel agreed.

"I like it," said Raina.

Carl cocked his head to one side in a decidedly Rick-esque fashion. "I can live with it. She does kinda look like a Feta."

"Then it's settled," Daryl declared, straightening and patting the goat twice firmly on her auburn flank. She bleated nervously. "Quiet, girl."

"I don't think we should be namin' her," Rick commented, sauntering up with a small, stern fold between his brows. "We don't know how long she'll be around."

The light of the situation disappeared in the dark vacuum of reality, wrought by Rick's rather blunt, but truthful words. Rory frowned at the man, but said nothing.

Beth paled. Carl paused in petting Feta and furrowed his brow as well before hopping off of the back of the pickup with a sigh, retreating to go stand by the station wagon, as well. Raina's chin quivered almost imperceptibly, but her eyes hardened and she went in the opposite direction Carl had, toward Glenn and Maggie's ride.

"Was that called for?" Carol questioned, disapproval coloring her tone. "They were only having a little fun."

"Way I see it, the less attached they get to something that can't defend itself, the better," Rick replied unrepentantly. "Her purpose is functional. She's not a pet."

Feta bleated again, loudly. Rory turned to frown at her, as if the goat could help being a dinner bell. Movement past her caught his eye, however, and his chest seized suddenly.

"Not just a pet," he managed, and they all looked at him. He pointed to the horizon. "Alarm."

Rick's group called them _walkers_. It had never occurred to him to give the dead a solid, collective name.

It was truly the end of humanity.

And he didn't feel any sort of sympathy for the dead bodies themselves, as that would make it rather difficult to kill them; but the days when bodies were a symbol of the life someone had lived and not the second hungry one they would awaken to were over. Surely, all over the world people were raising their fists to the sky and speaking unabashed ill of the dead and no one would condemn or fault them for it.

It was just _odd_. Everything about the new world was odd.

But he would have to think on it later, when upwards of thirty walkers weren't bearing down on them.

Without a word to one another, the group piled into their respective cars in terse silence and took off again.

He remembered when he'd set his sights on DC. Back when he and Diane had joined forces with her neighbor, Alan, who was a bachelor and practically lived off of takeout and canned green beans - the latter of which came in endless handy.

They'd had a goal, an endgame. They had family in DC.

After losing them both, he'd been on his own even when he ran into others. Everyone always got the kick some way or another, whether it be from _walkers_ or other humans, so the only way to truly exist with the least amount of heartbreak possible was to isolate himself.

Being alone made the trip to DC daunting, and therefore unworthy of his time. Any benevolent groups he'd met weren't interested in going so far north for whatever reason - and he doubted Rick's would simply up and go because he suspected his father's family was holed up somewhere around there. It was a general goal and their time would be better spent finding a suitable place to hunker down for winter so that Lori could have her baby in relative peace and safety; not chasing an idea.

In the very back of his mind, he also knew that his father had also probably had the same plan, and the thought of seeing Vincent again made his chest seize painfully.

It shouldn't have mattered.

Survival was survival, and his daddy issues were inconsequential in the greater picture.

Still. That plan was on the backburner as long as Raina lived.

And she _would_ live.

She was only a child. If it wrecked him when his previous adult acquaintances died, it would absolutely destroy him if she were to leave him, too.

"Feta's being really loud," the object of his thoughts whispered to Maggie. "I think they're following us because she's scared."

"Let's not think about that right now," Maggie soothed.

Glenn smiled reassuringly. "If she's scared of them, it's only because she can see them. As soon as we lose them, she'll probably calm down a little."

"Out of sight, out of mind," Rory said, and lightly tugged on one of the curls that had escaped from her bun.

She smacked his head away. "They're never out of mind," she muttered.

Rory sighed and glanced out of the back window. "Unequivocally."

"What's that?"

"Without a doubt."

"Oh."

…

By the time the sky began to darken, they had only just gotten far enough from the threat. In a remarkable feat of competence, the walkers had managed to follow them at least forty miles at their own speed. They were playing a game of very dangerous catch-up.

"That damn goat," Rick groused when they stopped at a gas station to rummage and confer. "It's more trouble than it's worth."

"We haven't even milked her, yet," T-Dog protested. "If we get rid of her now, all of this would'a been for nothin'."

Rick exhaled heavily. "If we get rid of it now, the problem will solve itself."

"She should ride in the car with us, Dad," Carl suggested. "That way the walkers won't be able to hear her."

"It's a _goat_ ," Lori remarked, wrinkling her nose. "That'll smell terrible, Carl."

Rory felt the bizarre urge to laugh, and before he could help it, a snicker escaped. Everyone looked at him and he flushed, but still couldn't control himself and turned away to cover his mouth with his hand.

"Wanna share with the class?" T-Dog requested dryly.

"It's just," he cleared his throat, "I don't mean to be inappropriate. I'm sorry. I'll be quiet."

"I wanna know the joke," Raina implored, tugging on his hand. He shook his head and coughed again to get his expression under control.

He didn't want to call Lori out. She seemed to be having a hard enough time relating to Carl in any shape, form or fashion.

But they were literally being tailed by a herd, three dozen strong.

Perhaps she would have been more willing to cooperate if they had a couple of royal pine fresheners handy.

"We're putting the goat in the car," Rick announced.

When Daryl walked by him to aid in getting Feta down from the bed of the truck, Rory swore he saw the ghost of a smirk on the hunter's lips and felt confident that he wasn't the only one thinking it.

…

They were exhausted.

Barring the goat and the gas station, they hadn't stopped all day and the ceaseless traveling was wearing on them all. He and Maggie had briefly bonded over the discovery that they had used the same hairspray Before, and in the aftermath, he'd clammed up when he realized he was forging a connection and the car's atmosphere had changed dramatically from fluid to formal and quiet.

He sensed that Glenn knew what he was trying to do, because the man shot him sympathetic looks every now and again and he wasn't sure how he felt about it.

A dilemma arose when night officially fell and they still hadn't found a suitable place to sleep for the night. They couldn't travel in the dark because of the headlights on the cars, and busting them out and creating more noise was out of the question. As a last resort, it was decided that they would park the cars in a circle in the field they'd stopped beside and sleep in them while a constant watch was established in pairs.

"Lake, can I trust you for second watch?"

He straightened from re-tying his shoelaces and stared up at the curly-haired man with wide eyes. The wording caught him off guard, as did the unexpectedly intense look he found himself on the receiving end of.

"Er - yes?"

"You don't sound sure."

"I'm sure," he asserted firmly.

Rick nodded curtly. "Good. You'll be with Hershel."

"Okay."

Carol handed out granola bar halves and the portions of squirrel that Daryl had managed to find in the surrounding woods and Beth tried her hand at milking Feta, who cooperated astonishingly well and filled a scratched plastic pitcher almost three-fourths of the way full. Raina and Carl patted and lavished the goat in attentions from opposite ends, and Rory was reminded of the way children in preschool played beside each other whilst not interacting at all.

When everyone had had their (for the first time in a while) rather nutritious fill of food and milk - as Feta had made more than enough to go around and they didn't exactly have a fridge to store it - they settled for the night in the cars as Rick and Daryl circled them, rifle and crossbow in hand respectively. The campfire - small so as not to attract attention to themselves in the open field - had been beaten down to embers.

He opened his sleeping bag all the way to make it function as a blanket and let Raina have it to sleep under across the backseat while Maggie and Glenn shared the passenger seat, which was kicked all the way back.

For a moment after the arrangement had been made, he considered for the first time where where might sleep. As he pondered this, he leaned against the side of the green Hyundai and watched Daryl pace. Even in the dark, the tracker's handsomely rugged visage was a sight for sore eyes.

"Those biceps really are something, aren't they?"

He worried he might have gotten whiplash from the velocity at which his head spun around. Carol stood beside him, and whether she was amused or disconcerted by his ogling, he couldn't tell; her face was practically Braille for all he could read it.

Instead of replying, he cleared his throat and began to excuse himself to find somewhere to kip.

"Oh, honey," the older woman rolled her eyes, smiling very slightly, "I'm only teasing you."

"Oh." He offered an awkward smile and scratched the back of his neck. "He's… yes, I do think they're…" He glanced back over to Daryl, who had turned and locked eyes with him for just a second. "...biteable."

"Biteable?" Carol snorted.

"I'm not taking it back," he muttered, crossing his arms. "You started it."

He took a moment to consider all he knew of Carol.

Her face, though mildly entertained on the surface, was lined with the undeniable imprint of loss - it resided in her dainty eyebrows and the tight set of her mouth; the flatness of her pale eyes and the weariness of her body language. She was a resilient tower in the raspy winds of trial and tribulation. Even if she revealed herself to be a character he didn't particularly like, she earned respect from him merely by the strength of her form, and if that made him shallow, he would readily admit to it.

He could tell she was sizing him up much like he had her. "It's dangerous to assume something about someone you don't know by how they look."

He looked away.

"But I saw you when Daryl dragged you out of that store," she continued, eyes intense, "and as soon as I got a good look at you, I knew you weren't trouble. Most people don't try to put up the 'nice guy' front when they're being manhandled, but something told me you weren't acting. That your face just _looks_ like that. Like if you had a jacket to spare, you'd toss it over a puddle to get baby ducks across."

That made him more self-conscious than he knew she probably meant him to feel. Or perhaps she wasn't saying these things to make him feel any particular way; quite possibly, this was the real Carol. Saying things because she believed them to be true, and not because he needed to hear them.

"Raina trusts you because you're a little boy in a man's body - virtually harmless to her, and that's important to a kid in this world," she mused aloud, and he blinked owlishly. "I only know one other man like that around here, and he doesn't exactly go about it like you do."

He furrowed his brow, unsure of how to interpret this - uncertain of who she spoke of, not knowing if it was complimentary or critical - but before he summoned the courage to ask, she sauntered away after patting his arm in a fashion he supposed might have been considered as _motherly_.

"Get some sleep," she tossed over her shoulder. "You need to be well-rested for second watch."

He nodded and watched as she went around the station wagon across the fire to enter from the passenger side before looking up to the stars and wondering, not for the first time, if this group would stick it out.

Not one of his previous companions were strong like Carol - without a single word and like a majestic rock formation.

Not even Diane.

He rubbed wearily at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger and climbed up on top of the green Hyundai as carefully and noiselessly as possible to gaze up at the stars as he drifted off into a light sleep, soon to be awoken for the watch he suspected was a test of his trustworthiness.

 **A/N: A great, big thanks to** Bloodblack Alchemist **,** Woodland Spirit **, and** lunasky99 **for favoriting and/or following this story, and an extra special shout out and virtual moonpie to** GawkyTC **for doing both and granting me with this story's first review! Read, review, tell me what you think of this chapter - I want honesty just as much, if not more than praise. I aim to grow.**


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